This year I have made a big push towards making Visual Studio Team Services my new continuous everything for my mobile apps, libraries, and any other project that I work on. While Azure DevOps (VSTS) has a lot of built in tasks for mobile applications, there are still a few essential things missing that would really make it a joy to use. The top that stuck out was having the ability to easily bump the version/build …
James Montemagno
Last week Visual Studio 2017 version 15.4 and VS for Mac 7.2 were released into the stable channel. They include the very first release of the Xamarin Live Player capabilities in Visual Studios. This means you can simply update Visual Studio, turn on Xamarin Live Player (Preview), and get started visualizing your mobile apps with nothing more than VS and your iOS or Android device!
James Montemagno
The Connectivity Plugin for Xamarin is my second most installed NuGet package with nearly 600,000 installs at time of writing this. It is easy to see why as it gives developers the ability to check connectivity on any platform with a single line of code, subscribe to events, and see what the current connection type is, with a complete cross platform API for iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows.
James Montemagno
A few years back I published some awesome Xamarin.Android item and project templates to simplify development with Android’s AppCompat libraries. The item templates have actually found their way into Visual Studio, which is pretty awesome: What about the project templates? Well I am hoping for this fall to unleash brand new templates for Xamarin.Android directly in the box, but until then I have updated my Visual …
James Montemagno
I recently blogged about Android’s super fancy new BottomNavigationView, and how easy it was to get started with them in your Xamarin.Android application. I also went through a lot of color customizations that developers can blend in to really make their BottomNavigationView stand out. While this new bottom navigation is awesome, it is also still brand new with a lot of features locked behind internals and hidden …
James Montemagno